Sunshine hangs the turbulence of the 20th-century on the wan frown of Ralph Fiennes. It would seem a thin hook from which to suspend matters of such weighty consequence as two world wars, Nazism and the rise of Stalin, but such is both the daring and the folly of Istvan Szabo's Sunshine.
A thick-soled epic which casts Fiennes as the male representative of three subsequent generations of the Jewish-Hungarian Sonnenschein family, Sunshine pulls a fascinating reversal on most historically-framed movies. Where films like Lawrence Of Arabia, Ghandi, Patton or Reds allow performance to push history into the back seat, this one lets it do the driving.
Partly it's the nature of the history - which doesn't get much more intrusive than world war, the Holocaust and the Soviet empire - and partly it's Fiennes. An actor who specializes in dour glowering, he endures the century's stormy tempers like a lighthouse in the north Atlantic. No matter what he's hit with, Fiennes never lets that uppercrusty crankiness slip.
But not only does Fiennes' unevolving glumness suggest a strong genetic legacy, it allows us to concentrate on history without the distraction of compelling character.
Whether by default or design then, Fiennes' distinctive brand of anti-charisma makes Sunshine a movie of ideas. And lucky for it and for us that those ideas are so solid and compelling. Tracing the Sonnenschien family from its tonic-producing shtetl roots to pillars of the Budapest bourgeoisie - pillars which will crumble beneath Nazi jackboots and Stalinist repression - Szabo frames the century's history through the arc of anti-semitism. Each generation is hopelessly subjected to and defined by it (the movie's grim second act concludes at Auschwitz) and it finally proves as inescapable as the family name - a name dropped by one assimilation-seeking generation only to be retrieved by the next.
While the concept is valid and intriguing, it's not enough to keep Sunshine, which is a not-too-breezy three hours long, from occasionally feeling like a forced march through the ugliest neighbourhoods of the century. (Compared to this, Szabo's best-known earlier historical tragedies, the Oscar-winning Mephisto and Colonel Redl, resemble exercises in pure kinetic momentum.)
Fiennes' monochromatic presence is one reason for this, others include Szabo's middlebrow seriousness and tendency toward TV-plain imagery: the movie often looks as drab as its characters' lives are, which may be valid thematically but hardly pumps the proceedings with much juice.
Still, in the same way Sunshine's historical context provides dramatic momentum the central drama lacks, the movie benefits from certain fuel-injecting performances on the periphery: as Valerie, the young cousin whom the first-act Fiennes falls in love with, Jennifer Ehle brings a spark of vivacity so strong to the movie you suspect it might be the only thing the century cannot douse. And you're right: as she ages into Rosemary Harris (Ehle's real-life mother and just as vibrant), Valerie is the only thing to make it from one end of this movie to the other. William Hurt turns up long enough to establish a lingering impression as a conscientious (and therefore doomed) Communist functionary, and John Neville brings a note of refreshing roguery to a small role as the family's aging revolutionary.
This kind of stuff helps keep Sunshine afloat, but it can't prevent the movie from taking on a lot of water by the time it finally reaches the shore.
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